


Remnant

by Prestidigitations



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials, Non Consensual Daemon Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 14:31:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1691690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prestidigitations/pseuds/Prestidigitations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the battle, the Winter Soldier goes searching for something he's missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remnant

**Author's Note:**

> I just love Daemon AUs and I really wanted a chance to write one after the events of the movie. its unbeta'd so please let me know if its off anywhere and feel free to comment whatever

It does not take long to find her. Rumours reach him of a devil in the east, some sort of fiend long dormant kept locked away at HYDRA’s bidding that has come awake and is wreaking havoc in the bases there and for the second time in his life the Winter Soldiers feels a stir of longing.

Traveling without a dæmon should be more difficult than it is, but this is Russia, spirits have roamed here a thousand years and one more ghost in the snow is of no consequence. No one thinks to pay him any mind when they catch a glimpse of him traveling alone at night; they are lucky for it.

He reaches the facility that was said to have birthed the monster and is unsurprised to find it has been laid to waste. Bodies lay freezing in the snow and the dark, wet caverns beneath the earth are damp and quiet.

There is nothing there.

 He moves on.

It takes two more decimated bases and a public sighting before he catches up to her in the heart of a safe house for a senior HYDRA scientist, the latest in a long line of victims. She is panting on the corpse covered in blood when he comes in and they lock eyes in the flickering lights. For a moment she does nothing but blink but slowly, and with some difficulty, she stands and opens her mouth wide, impossibly wide and snarls.

She is on him before he can blink and the speed and the brutality of her attack is almost enough to surprise him. She bites him, catching hold of the metal arm he’s brought up to brace against the bulk of the attack, and tears clean through the casing and into the circuitry beneath and it occurs to him that that is highly unusual.

When she pulls away to snarl again he notices her teeth gleam with the same dull light as his arm and he feels something tight and uncomfortable blossom in his chest. He cannot place the emotion, but he wishes he did not feel it.

She does not seem to care at all; she does not seem to know him. He reaches for her all the same and is met again and again by her teeth and her snarls and her howling, vicious anger. She does not flee. He thinks she means to kill him but after a time she tires and sits back on her haunches, waiting for him to say his piece.

He licks his lips and tries his voice for the first time since he left America.

“Do you know me?” he asks roughly. Her ears twitch, her hackles rise, and when she speaks her voice is hushed and halting, as if she too has not spoken for some time.

“Yes,” she hisses, “I know you.” Her eyes are black as pitch where they bore into him and she makes the sensation of being studied not unlike being eaten alive. She curls her enormous mouth into an approximation of a grin. “Why have you come? Are they done playing with you so soon?”

The scorn in her voice stings and he feels his fists clench on instinct. She watches the motion impassively. He thinks this is the second creature in all the world who has never shown fear.

“Why are you here?” she asks again. There is no way to tell if she is curious or impatient her voice is so flat and deep. Her eyes have not left his; she does not seem to blink.

“You didn’t come,” he says simply. The anger in her eyes could melt steel.

“You _left_ me,” she snarls, “You are always forgetting, always leaving me behind, always! Why would I go to you? So you can bring us back here? I will see you dead first.” She lunges towards him again, livid and wild and her teeth close inches from where he had been standing but she doesn’t come towards him again.

Her ears twist instead and she brings her head up sharply. She peers through the gloom of the safe house with her hackles raised.

“Were you followed?” she whispers. He shakes his head. Someone somewhere must have triggered an alarm when the scientist missed his check in.

Soldiers tumble through the carnage towards them and all but gibber in fear when they see them standing together in the flickering lights.

The Soldier wastes no time. The firearm at his side is stolen and ancient- pulled off the corpse of man whose house he robbed on his way into the wilds- but it hardly matters. His first shot catches a man straight through the heart; his wolf dæmon dissolves into a shower of golden sparks with a cry of rage.

 The other soldiers hesitate for a second but that is all the dæmon at his side needs to bound forward. Her odd legs propel her in a leap that has her completely bypassing a man’s snarling wildcat dæmon and puts her straight at his throat instead. Her metal teeth gleam as her jaws close around the unprotected flesh of his neck and she shakes her head once, tearing viciously.

The man falls down dead and the men around her cry out in terror.

One man turns to wretch and is sick all over the floor. He stumbles away blindly moments later clutching his hawk dæmon to his chest like a child. When she lifts her head from the dead man’s throat and reveals the red wash of her face another faints dead away.

The dæmons all cower instantly overcome with shock and horror while their men moan in fear. They are so stunned by her casual transgression of the Great Taboo that they do not notice when he slinks past them and picks them off in a series of quick shots.

When their dæmons have faded she looks up at him taking stock of his measure. He does not know what she sees there but she seems satisfied. She turns her head towards the dead men instead and growls.

“Cut off one head,” she sighs, “And two more shall take its place.” She is quiet a moment considering something and then she turns to peer up at him again. “There will be more coming, come.”

When she trots briskly away he follows her without thinking brought to heel by her quick command. The rote submission is so ingrained he doesn’t even have time to check himself before they are already outside trudging through the snow. He stops just to remind himself he can and she pauses with him and looks back at where he is standing.

“What is it?” she asks with a wary, hunted look in her eyes. He can feel his heart thundering in his chest as he wets his lips and tries his voice again.

“I don’t want to go that way,” he whispers. Nothing happens, she does not come for him, there is no pain, no punishment, no harsh lights and rubber stops being forced into his mouth. He stands alone in the snow with a dæmon free to do his own will. He made this choice. When he failed in his mission, he came here instead.

The force of it all is suddenly too much and he feels the tension ratchet through his body as he braces for something, anything. His heart is pounding in his ears and his breath comes in short, wild bursts and he can’t be out like this- he is a weapon, he has his orders, he needs to-

“That’s enough!” he hears a voice snap and he sees the dæmon- _his_ dæmon she is **_his_** \- has walked back and is now peering into his face with something like concern on her bloody face. He stares down at her and she settles herself back onto her back feet and balances in her peculiar way with her head cocked.

“Something’s happened,” she murmurs, “Hasn’t it? I thought I felt it earlier, something’s happened to you, that’s why I woke up.” She woke up alone and started killing, he can’t say he’s surprised; if she is his, it’s all they know, but he has to be sure.

“You know me,” he whispers and the dæmon nods her head. “Are you mine?”

“I know you,” she repeats quietly, “I think I was once, a long time ago.”

 A long time ago. There were pictures in the museum from a long time ago, decades ago, pictures of a young man with dark hair and a dæmon whose form was that of a creature long gone extinct. Pictures from a life he couldn’t remember, if it had ever been _his_ life at all.

“Do you remember anything?” he asks, “From before?” she considers him again and flicks her ears in a dismissive gesture.

“Some things,” she says “smells mostly, and sounds, I remember a boy is bed and a city and falling, falling so far and being broken, I remember being cut-” She pauses then and shudders. “I remember being alone, and I remember you and killing for you.” It is not much, but it is more than he can say for the state of his own memories.

“Do you remember a man in a train?” he asks thinking about the American hero he left half dead on the shore of the Potomac. She flicks her ears again.

“There were many men,” she growls, “And many trains, but if we do not get way from here they will come and make us both forget. If you do not want to go north where do you want to go?” She is asking seriously, he can feel his breath start to come short again.

“Stop that,” she snaps, “Tell me where you want to go!” An order she is ordering him she is ordering him to choose-

“The mountains,” he gasps, thinking of the American and the train. “I need to go to the mountains.”

“Elbrus?” she asks and he shakes his head.

“In the west, I am going to the mountains in the west,” he says. “To the Alps.” She settles back down on her haunches and contemplates something before nodding to herself.

“I think,” she says carefully, “I think I will go with you, for now.”

They leave Russia behind them and begin traveling west. A man traveling with a dæmon should be less conspicuous than one without one but her strange form and irregular manners draw too many eyes so they return to sulking around in the dark.

Every HYDRA base nest or safe house they catch word of or remember they destroy leaving one less he is tempted to crawl back to. He becomes accustomed to her lean, predatory form moving alongside his and finds some measure of comfort in her nearness.

She is too callous to be comforting, too wild and desolate to be any form of shelter but she is steady and reliable and that is enough to be safe harbor for now, given what his world is.

She speaks to him sometimes, offers opinions when asked and answers questions that are put to her.

“Can dæmons lie?” he asks her one night while they are squatting in an old barn in Belarus. It has become their habit to talk quietly to one another in the dark when they settled down to wait for the day to break.

“All things lie,” she murmurs in the quiet, “There are some creatures, like the witches in the North or the panserbjørne, whose nature makes it difficult for them to do so, but in the end all things are deceitful, and dæmons, well, we are the hearts of men, and men are the most deceptive of all creatures.” He mulls that over picking at the damaged casing of his metal arm, it has started to spasm wildly when he does not actively think about it. It has been three months since he failed his mission. This could possibly be the longest he’s ever gone without undergoing maintenance.

“Are you disappointed?” she asks and now he can hear the humour in her tone, listen for the subtleties that betray her moods. He came for her because he’d always been told one’s dæmon could be trusted. He wanted answers, not more lies.

She seemed to sense his unease because he hears her laughing softly in the dark; he can just make out her silver teeth shining in the sparse light.

“I would not lie to you, what would be the point?” she says bluntly. “To lie to you would only be to deny myself the truth of something. Go ahead, ask me what you like, if I can, I will answer.” He considers a few questions.

“Have I always been like this?” he asks feeling the slight hum of power under his fingertips that comes from his metal arm. “Have I always been a killer?”

“To the very heart of you,” she replies chuckling at her own joke, “but I don’t think it was like this all the time. There was more once, or they wouldn’t have taken it. If there was nothing before why bother with the chair?” He can’t even think about the chair without wanting to run, whether he wants to disappear or return to it he still isn’t sure.

“Am I a monster?” he asks abruptly. He feels her moving in the dark, sees the brief shine of her eyes in the shadows above the gleam of her fangs.

“I guess we’ll see.” she says quietly.

They make it to the mountains and he gets restless. She watches him as he begins to pace in the night and he orders her to look for tracks, places a train might’ve once travelled. She does so without complaint and he is secretly surprised every time she leaves and returns with her findings.

It takes them weeks to find anything of any interest. They are halfway to Switzerland when suddenly something seems familiar and she unearths the rusted remains of rail-lines that seem to lead into the heart of the mountain.

They find the base carved out of the rock.

 There are no lights, dust covers everything like a fine mist and several of the rooms have collapsed into rubble. It is completely deserted. She picks her way through the detritus and helps navigate safe passage inside.

They find the shabby remnants of dozens of machines, papers abandoned to the decay of time; bodies in one room, and maps in another, and at the heart of the complex locked behind a dozen steel doors in a place where the caves seem coldest they find a room full of bloody implements and a single cot and cage.

“We were born here,” she says suddenly as they slowly enter the room, “I remember now, I remember waking up here.” He looks up searching for a fixture he knows should be there in the gloom and finds it mangled beyond repair but above them.

“There was a man,” he says picking carefully through what he remembers, “I tried to kill him but I couldn’t. I killed another man instead.” He can remember the light, and the pain and the voices of a dozen men, their panicked shouting. He remembers shouting for someone, screaming a name into the air in desperate fear.

“Schuyler?” he whispers and in the dark he can hear a sudden sharp sound, a sob or a sigh. Dimly he can see her in his mind’s eye. Not as she is now -tattered and seamed with ill-knit scars with metal teeth and ragged ears- but whole and hale. He can feel her panicked heartbeat thudding alongside his and he can see the bright, horrible flash of a knife-

“Stop,” he hears her whisper, “How are you doing that? Stop what you’re doing, it hurts!”

 He can feel them carving bits of her away, tearing at some innumerable force between them. He can hear her terrified sobbing and his own ragged screams. He can feel her disappearing. He can barely hear her heart beat at all and he’s begging now, begging them to stop **_please_**

His dæmon, they’re cutting away his dæmon; if they don’t stop they’ll be nothing left. she’s frightened, he’s frightened, they won’t stop; she’s keening wildly, high and desperate and he rips himself free of the table and throttles the nearest man with a knife, reaching for her-

-Bucky? Where is Bucky? Where is her boy? Where? Where have they taken him? She can’t feel him, she’s lost, she’s all alone. This is death. This is hell. Heart sounds, human sounds. Her claws slip on tile, slick and slippery with blood. Where is he? Why can’t she find him? Why can’t she feel him?

Men come. Men come with poles and wires and pain and they _touch_ her, they grip her with their **_hands_** and there is shouting, languages. They talk but she can’t understand without Bucky; where is her boy? She begs them. She kills them, feels human blood in her mouth and retches, but she wants her boy, she’ll kill anything that keeps her from him.

 Blood. Human fear-sweat. Grief- smell and terror, but where is Bucky? Why won’t he come? Why can’t she feel him calling? More hands now and pain so much pain bright coppery sharp. They are pulling her teeth. She can’t bite, how can she protect her boy? _Where is he_? Pain in her neck, needles sounds and smells going dark, let it be death, at least in death her boy will be waiting-

“Stop it!”

 He is in abandoned laboratory in the heart of a mountain. He is Bucky Barnes, he is Schuyler Barnes. They are the Winter Soldier. They are a memory.

“Who was that?” he asks when he can control his breathing. He is on the floor somehow, but he doesn’t remember how he got there. “Was that you?”

“How did you do that?” Schuyler growls, voice dangerously low.

“The bond-” he starts to suggest but he is cut off by a sudden flash of teeth poised perilously close to this throat.

There is no bond!” she snarls, “They cut-”

“They cut most of it away,” he finishes rubbing absently at the sudden, tearing ache in his chest. “This must be what’s left.” The dæmon is quiet for a moment. He can feel her slowly move away from him.

“I felt-” she starts and curses quietly to herself. “For a moment, I could feel you again, I _remembered_.” Already the memory is fading, lost again in its usual dim and painful haze, but for a moment…

“Maybe it’s healing,” he whispers. Schuyler scoffs loudly and he can see her faint form pacing in the darkness.

“Scars may fade with time,” she sighs, “but they can’t heal.”

“This feel like a scar to you?” he asks. She says nothing.

They leave the caverns of the base and come back in the morning with torches. He finds several blueprints for the early designs of his arm, for the modifications made to Schuyler’s jaws and legs, for their cryo-chambers, he tucks them away and searches for more but finds nothing.

Schuyler is like a ghost at his side pacing menacingly in the dark with her hackles raised. She disappears at one point and returns with something in her mouth that she drops unceremoniously at his feet. It is a button, faded and worn with age and torn from the jacket of his old coat. She doesn’t say where she found it, she doesn’t say anything at all and only growls in satisfaction when he piles everything he can into the cell at the heart of the mountain and tosses a match inside. They leave before the fire is done. They never return.

The bond heals. It mends or it re-scars over. This time as it does it blends them together. He catches flashes of her thoughts flitting amongst his own as it deepens. She is blunt and precise, cynical and calculating, to her the world is so much meat but he feels her soften for some things, her thoughts grow wistful and strange when they hear a strain of music or watch children playing in a town.

She dreams of hands, cruel hands that cut and hurt, hands that mutilated and perverted but softer hands too, hands that caressed and gentled, hands that were comfort. He cannot recall those hands but he knows they were once his. He does not remember how to be those hands; he may never be those hands again.

He does not touch her.

She does not ask him to.

“Where will you go now?” she asks him one night as they settle into an old attic in Chagny for the night. “You don’t intend to run forever?” He can distantly sense her concern. His arm is worse than ever and he feels thin and worn. Hydra will come looking, they always come looking.

“I am going to the city,” she says simply and in her thoughts he sees an old dusty memory of a redbrick jungle. He can smell rats and boy-sweat and filth in the gutters, he sees the skyline and feels a longing like the ache of the bond. New York. Brooklyn. _Home_.

“It’s not what you remember,” he warns her. They have been getting bits and pieces back in patches since their stint in the lab. They have lived a separate set of lifetimes; precious little of what they remember overlaps. He vaguely recalls the city in his own mind, a skyline of towering monoliths and sleek silver; he thinks his memory is the most recent between them.

“I don’t care,” she sniffs, “I want to see it, I want to see what it is now.”  A new city for her old-new eyes, he doesn’t think the world is ready for her, he’s not sure it ever has been.

“The Americans will be on their guard,” he muses, “Their defenses have broken down; with all their blood in the water they’ll be vigilant.”

“By all means,” she chuckles darkly, “let them set foxes on hounds, we’ll see who leads the hunt.”

“Please, the fox doesn’t fear the dog; he’s scared of the gun,” Bucky snorts, “Without men dogs are nothing. _We’re_ dogs without collars, dogs without men, who’s scared of a lost dog alone in the woods?” She doesn’t say anything after that but he indistinctly senses the restless quiet of her thoughts long after the sun rises.

They spend months in France, just France, going from small farming hamlets, to tiny towns, to sprawling cites and back again. The make progress, they regress, they heal, they bleed. They destroy HYDRA nests whenever they find them. They meet people, real _people_ with lives that revolve around more than missions and bloodshed and dæmons who can feel more than dim stirrings of unease or affection. They eventually make it to England and to London where old memories overlap with new the way the old city bleeds into its modernity. They live for the first time in nearly seventy years.

They have been idling in a stolen loft for about a week when it happens. He is counting the stripes on Schuyler’s back and watching her pace in front of their fireplace when she turns to him and jumps into a chair, signaling a shift into serious conversation.

“There are men here who can get us into the city,” she says plainly and carefully. He frowns knowing where this going. “I am leaving. I want you to come with me.” He picks at his metal arm. It is all but useless these days, little more than dead weight. It has been eleven months since his last mission.

“You’re going looking for him?” he asks and she doesn’t have to ask who he means. Captain Steven Grant Rogers, the man on the bridge, Steve; he and his dæmon have been on their minds since the turn of the New Year.

Schuyler flicks her ears in an impatient gesture.

“He will find us no doubt,” she sighs and sets her paws on the table like a human being. “James, _Bucky_ , it’s time we went home, we have work to do there.” Home. She says the word with such feeling, makes it all sound so easy, like a man dead seventy years with the blood of so many staining his hands can just waltz back into a life he just barely remembers having.

“Schuyler,” he sighs. “That’s not home anymore.” How can New York be home when he constantly has to remind himself that the Americans are not foreign threats but his own people? How can it be home when the language that falls easiest from his lips, the language he converses in with his dæmon is as far removed from English as any can be? How can a place he can barely remember be any sort of safe heaven?

Schuyler stares fixedly ahead, apparently resigned to going alone. There is a stubborn set to her jaws and ears he rarely sees. He wonders who she learned that from. He knows she will go, with or without him and the thought makes him feel something he still doesn’t have words for.

 She feels the longing to return someplace he doesn’t and he’s jealous and also confused. What is left of the life they had in New York but a few scattered memories and a man they are no longer fit to be seen with?

He had come looking for her, his dæmon, a rumor; he had come hoping to find what was left. She is more than he bargained for, more than he can handle really. Fierce and awkward and so out of place in the body of a creature that has been dead since 1936, she has been anomalous and alone all her life, except that she absolutely hasn’t.

He knows she does not feel the call of a city; she is drawn to the pull of a man. Home and Steve had been synonymous as far as he can remember. He doesn’t think they are ready for either of them.

“I am going,” Schuyler says simply. She doesn’t wait to hear his answer and disappears into the room she chose for herself. He does not see her for the rest of the night.

Her plans are delayed twice by an up swell of HYDRA activity in their area. They raid a base that emerges in the heart of London and make two trips to the continent to tie up loose ends. Schuyler grows impatient and takes it out on men and dæmons alike and he stays out of her way.

They come in bloody and bedraggled from a poorly planned escape one day and find the red-haired SHIELD woman waiting for them in their living room. He thinks he recognizes her from some place more than the fight in Washington but he can’t be sure.

“You’re a hard man to find,” she murmurs as she strokes the fur of her dæmon an enormous lynx whose sleek form and glossy fur makes Schuyler look exceptionally ragged.

“We could kill you,” he points out dully. He can think of about six ways things might pan out and they all end unpleasantly for the both of them but it doesn’t look she’s going to give them a choice. Schuyler pulls her lips up to snarl and back his threat and reveals the gleaming metal shine of her teeth. The woman doesn’t even blink. She has a way of smiling without smiling that seems entirely too familiar.

“You’ve done good work here,” she says changing the topic. “It’s been impossible to credit you to any of this of course and I can’t say I’m surprised.” She has a dozen or so thick manila envelopes in front of her and she picks through them with delicate fingers. “If even half these reports are true though, you’ve been pretty busy.”

“What do you want?” Schuyler asks. The woman looks down at his dæmon for a long moment.

“This location has been compromised,” she answers. “HYDRA knows you’re here and we do too. He’s coming here as we speak so if you’re not ready to talk I suggest you find somewhere else to be in the morning.” She doesn’t have to say who she means.

He does not think they are ready and judging by the faint, echo-y panic he can feel rattling inside his head neither does his dæmon.

“Why warn us?” he asks eyes narrowed. He feels a sudden surge of protective rage coiling low in his gut. This woman is supposed to be his friend, if he thinks she plans to betray him in any way he and Schuyler will kill her right now.

“I think you’ve had enough decisions made above your head,” she murmurs, “He’s not thinking straight. He misses you and he needs you, but you have a say in this too, you still have a right to choose.” She stands abruptly and her lynx falls into step as silently as falling snow. “I’ve brought you everything we have on you; it might help you keep ahead of us for a while if that’s what you want to do. Good luck, whatever you choose.” Schuyler steps out of her way and allows her to leave their loft.

When Steve arrives in the early hours of the morning he finds the loft empty. Sitting on the table are two things: a postcard from a museum of cartoons they had felt oddly compelled to go into as they had walked by and a battered blue button from an old coat. Steve pockets them both and gathers his dæmon and their friends. He stops looking for them.

Four months later he breaks into a hospital in Manhattan hours after Steve is airlifted there for treatment of wounds he incurred under heavy fire. He will make a full recovery thanks largely in part to the fact that he and Schuyler had quietly dispensed with most of the serious threats to his health early into the fighting. It seemed that despite everything that had come to pass and their own pressing concerns shadowing Steve and watching his back still comes as natural as breathing. They wait patiently for all of his friends and well-wishers to shuffle in and offer idle chatter and company and slip past the guard as night falls.

It is a strange thing.

Once, there was a man who was brave and strong and clever. He went to war to fight for something better than himself: a frail boy with a witch-fire soul and a heart so big the world didn’t deserve it. War made that man a weapon; it made his friend a hero. It killed them both.

The man’s soul fell into evil hands who had no interest in the man he was, just the weapon he is. They cut him up and away. Waiting underneath is a soldier. The story should end there but it doesn’t, it keeps going until the soldier finds the hero and remembers he is a man.

He is Bucky Barnes, he is Schuyler Barnes. They are what’s left. They are the Winter Soldier. They are a memory. They are alive. The story should end there but it doesn’t, it keeps going.

“Are we ready to do this?” he asks as Steve’s eyelids begin to flutter and his dæmon stirs on his chest. Schuyler doesn’t say anything. She just pushes her head up under his hand as Steve opens his eyes.

He takes them both in and smiles softly.

Underneath his fingers, her fur is warm.

**Author's Note:**

> Ten points if you can guess what Schuyler is c:


End file.
